No matter, this paper published today in Nature Climate Change by Hedemann et al. not only confirms the existence of “the pause” in global temperature, but suggests a cause, saying “…the hiatus could also have been caused by internal variability in the top-of-atmosphere energy imbalance“.

That’s an important sentence, because it demonstrates that despite many claims to the contrary, CO2 induced forcing of the planetary temperature is not the control knob, and natural variability remains in force.